ITECH1104 Report: Cloud and Mainframe Technologies in Australian Banks

This report investigates the use of mainframe and cloud technologies in the Australian banking sector. It outlines core business services offered by banks, including individual, business, and digital banking, and their associated security and privacy needs. The report details the ICT workload types required, such as batch, transactional, and analytical workloads, and provides examples of their application. It further discusses the benefits of cloud technologies in banking, highlighting economic advantages and improved manageability, and explains why mainframes remain essential for big data services, security, risk identification, and fraud detection. The report concludes that the combination of mainframes and cloud services provides significant benefits to banking organizations by offering state-of-the-art solutions for their business processes.

Running head: CLOUD AND ENTERPRISE COMPUTING
Cloud and Enterprise Computing
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Core Business Services offered by the Bank...............................................................................2
Three business services offered by the bank...........................................................................2
Brief description of security and privacy needs in relation to the bank’s core business
services....................................................................................................................................3
Requirement for ICT workload types in the Bank.......................................................................4
Two examples of how banks use ICT batch workload type....................................................4
Two examples of how banks use ICT transactional workload type........................................4
Two examples of how banks use ICT analytics workload type..............................................4
Benefits of using cloud technologies in banking sector..............................................................5
Why major banks use mainframes...............................................................................................5
Conclusion...............................................................................................................................6
References........................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
Banks are huge financial institutions that are responsible for handling the money for the
common mass in the entire world. This makes the Banks rely mostly on the capacity, speed,
intelligence, security and accountability for the responsibility it holds. Since, the banking
industry goes through almost millions of transactions every day; mainframes are required for it
has a capability of handling more than 2.5 billion transactions per day (Hon & Millard, 2018). In
Australian banks as well, the core business services utilize mainframes, including the cloud
services along with it. The following report would thus consist of the business services that these
banks in Australia offer to their customers and the security and privacy needs that the core
services need. This will pave the way for ICT requirements of these banks according to their
workloads. Further, the report would present the benefits of implementing cloud services within
the banking sectors and the reasons why the banks mostly make use of mainframes.
Core Business Services offered by the Bank
Three business services offered by the bank
The three different kinds of banking services that the banks in Australia offer can be
classified in three different groups. This would be further described as below:
1. Individual banking: this is a type of services that usually the banks in Australia
offered to the different individuals for helping them in assisting the variety of services for
managing finances for an individual entity (Kelly, 2014). The services include the checking of
accounts for an individual, the savings account handling of an individual, management of debit
and credit cards, insurance services and Wealth Management.

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2. Business banking: these are the types of services that the banks in Australia mostly
offer to the business owners for managing their financial services would need a different
approach of banking segregating between the professional and personal finances (Newcombe,
2016). These type of banking services include the following such as business loans, checking
accounts, savings account, handling of debit and credit cards, merchant services like processing
of credit card, reconciliation and reporting, cheque collection and management of cash for
payroll services and deposit services.
3. Digital banking: this is the type of banking services offered by the banks in Australia
that has the ability to manage the finances of every customer online from a computer a
smartphone or tablet computer. The digital banking is becoming much more important to the
consumers nowadays and the services that the banks in Australia typically offer for digital
banking services to the customers include mobile check deposit, online, mobile and tablet
banking, alerting for transactions and other account information via text messages, producing
eStatements and online bill payments.
Brief description of security and privacy needs in relation to the bank’s core business
services
The banking sectors need a much more different approach of data security than other
forms of industries because these organisation deals with the financial data of the common mass
and biggest organisations in the entire world. Financial Institutions often have the tendency to
underestimate there is magnitude that the critical data of the business old across public and
private data networks (Davidson, 2015). Financial Institutions like banking services need in
depth strategies and to secure any kind of breach they must use Data Encryption as the last line
of Defence. Encrypting all the financial in customer information in both storage in transit, the

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banks can ensure customer trust in their brand and can even increase customer trust by making
them understand the security measures that the bank is put in order to protect the data and
finances that run within the banking process.
Requirement for ICT workload types in the Bank
In Australian banks, the core business services utilize mainframes, including the cloud
services along with it (Schlagwein, Thorogood & Willcocks, 2014). Therefore, it would require
batch workloads, transactional workloads and analytical workloads to work along the entire
banking service sectors across the entire Australia.
Two examples of how banks use ICT batch workload type
1. Typical batch workloads tend to process huge volumes of data. Therefore, the online
billing systems depend upon ICT batch workload type.
2. Security regulations are governed by ICT batch workload types.
Two examples of how banks use ICT transactional workload type
1. Billing and order processing.
2. Use of electronic commerce that reaches across partners and suppliers.
Two examples of how banks use ICT analytics workload type
1. Real-time computing capability to check for the fraudulent activities using
mainframes.
2. Big Data analytics used to make sense of the vast amounts of data across a complex
hybrid environment.

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Benefits of using cloud technologies in banking sector
Banking and financial industries have been utilizing the revolutionary concept of cloud
computing and it has become a widely growing phenomenon. The cloud computing systems
involves several computers within an organization to be connected through a real-time
communication network (Dzomira, 2015). Thus, a single program has the capability of running
through several computers at the same time. It can be easily analyzed that cloud computing
indeed has several benefits over the previous technologies as a result. These are described as
below:
Economic benefits: Cloud computing makes the banks avoid unnecessary investments
which would provide these banks focus on other important projects and business ventures.
Improved Manageability: With cloud computing into implementation, banks and large
financial industries can make rapid adjustments to their resources for all the unpredictable and
fluctuating business requests as well as quickly have their applications uploaded online in no
time due to the vastly improved management of Cloud computing that does not require much
maintenance (Newhouse, 2017).
Why major banks use mainframes
Mainframes, or the corporate slang Big Iron is the most rapid, reliable and robust
processing power that most financial institutions can make use of to handle their major
computing functions into action (Khan, 2016). However, there are several other reasons why
mainframes are used by the banking sectors in Australia. The reasons would be identified as
below:

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Big data service available with mainframes: Mainframes have the capability to run the
analysis for every financial transaction in real-time and this helps the banks to get a hands-on
idea about the changing needs of their customers, the rapidly changing trends in the market
place, and the information about the success and failures of the ventures and the initiatives that
the banks had put to use for the customers (Jerjawi, 2015). This makes the banks disregard the
idea of consultants from outside to perform the analytics. It is not related to the brand loyalty or
adopting latest technologies just for the sake of it, but mainframes in today’s time with added
advantages of Big Data serve the banking sectors with all sorts of benefits that it could ask for.
Security, risk identification and fraud detection: Banking sectors are required not just
to provide the customers with a framework and business process that would be effective for the
financial transactions; but it would also require a safe and secured service since it deals with
public money. The rapid analysis of the information generated from the mainframes provides the
banking transactions to be crunched in the fastest way possible (Bouma, Jeucken & Klinkers,
2017). This enables the business process to catch all kinds of banking frauds in the system which
mostly occurs due to the delays in processing. Mainframes have the ability to scan for any
noticed discrepancy within seconds so that banks can effectively catch and prevent frauds.
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded from the above report that the latest business processes
that the financial institutions like banking organizations in Australia utilizes, like the mainframes
amalgamated with cloud services provide maximum benefits to the entire business process. All
these systems provide huge advantages to the banking sectors by providing the state of the art
and superfast solutions for the business processes. These are identified with the above report
consisting of the business services that these banks in Australia offer to their customers and the

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security and privacy needs that the core services necessitate. This paves the way for ICT
requirements of these banks according to their workloads. Further, the report presented the
benefits of implementing cloud services within the banking sectors and the reasons why the
banks mostly make use of mainframes. The entire report helps to analyze how the mainframes
and ICT services provide heap of benefits to the banking sectors.

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References
Al Jerjawi, K. (2015). The role of human resource executives in mergers: a comparative case
study of two bank mergers, the merger of Westpac Corporation and St. George Bank
(Australia) and the merger of Emirates Bank International and the National Bank of
Dubai (UAE).
Bouma, J. J., Jeucken, M., & Klinkers, L. (Eds.). (2017). Sustainable banking: The greening of
finance. Routledge.
Davidson, L. S. (2015). The Cambridge Economic History of Australia. Edited bySimon
VilleandGlenn Withers. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xxi+ 668 pp.
Tables, photographs, figures, appendix, index. Cloth, $180.00. ISBN: 978-1-107-02949-
1. Business History Review, 89(4), 769-771.
Dzomira, S. (2015). Cyber-banking fraud risk mitigation-conceptual model. Banks and Bank
Systems, 10(2), 7-14.
Hon, W. K., & Millard, C. (2018). Banking in the cloud: Part 1–banks' use of cloud
services. Computer Law & Security Review, 34(1), 4-24.
Kelly, G. (2014). The digital revolution in banking. Group of Thirty.
Khan, A. (2016). Central Bank Governance and the Role of Nonfinancial Risk Management.
International Monetary Fund.
Newcombe, I. T. (2016). Mainframe Relevance in Modern IT: How a 50+ year old computing
platform can still play a key role in today’s businesses.

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Newhouse, C. P. (2017). STEM the boredom: Engage students in the Australian curriculum
using ICT with problem-based learning and assessment. Journal of Science Education
and Technology, 26(1), 44-57.
Schlagwein, D., Thorogood, A., & Willcocks, L. P. (2014). How Commonwealth Bank of
Australia Gained Benefits Using a Standards-Based, Multi-Provider Cloud Model. MIS
Quarterly Executive, 13(4).